Good thought. I'm not sure how this specific proposal would pan out, but it's definitely worth considering it as a possibility. You raise a very important point though - it's only the whale votes on here which really matter. In theory the right article can also get highly upvoted by thousands of minnow accounts, but in practice that rarely happens.

The real problem that this leads to is that a large amount of the content written for Steemit is frankly just pandering to whales for upvotes (all the "How Steemit will change the world!" and "How you're going to lose all your Steemit value!" posts).

Because these posts are targeting the whales, they're really not that interesting to anybody else, which makes the whole site less welcoming to new users, further increasing the disproportionate power of whale accounts, and causing a feedback loop.

I really don't know what the solution is, but I'm glad people are thinking about it :)